LIVING DANGEROUSLY IN KOREA:
The Western Experience, 1900-1950
Donald N. Clark
OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE CHOICE 2004
"Highly recommended. All libraries and readers." Choice April 2004 Vol.41 No. 08 G. Zheng, Angelo State University
“Don Clark has made a
masterful contribution to our understanding of how Korea became open to the West during the first half of the twentieth century. It is a story of intrepid
pioneers, from churches and business, who often endured harsh conditions to accomplish
extraordinary things. It is at once compelling and moving, yet unsentimental.”
— James
Laney, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, President Emeritus Emory
University, former missionary to Korea, 1959–1964
Korea was “discovered” by
the West after World War II when it became a flashpoint in the Cold War. Before
the war, however, it was home to many hundreds of Westerners who experienced
life there under Japanese colonial rule. These included missionaries who opened
Korea as a field for evangelism, education, and medicine; speculators who
risked much and reaped riches from mining concessions; and diplomats who tried
to keep them neutral, even as the Japanese forced them out of business on the
eve of the Pacific War.
In the first
part of the book, the author reconstructs the foreign community and highlights
the role of Americans in particular as participants in Korean history, bringing
vividly to life the lives and suffering and triumphs of the expatriate
community in Korea, especially the missionaries. In the second part of the
book, the author presents the altered circumstances of American military
occupation after 1945 and the consequences of the Americans’ assuming a role
not unlike the one that had been played earlier by the colonial Japanese.
By telling
the lives and experiences of Westerners, the author highlights the major
historical events of modern Korean history. Accounts of foreigners in the
Independence Movement and during the period of militarization in the 1930s shed
new light on what Japanese colonial rule meant to the Korean people. Similarly,
Western experiences in Korea in the 1940s amount to a commentary on the way
Korea was divided and the events that led inexorably to the ordeal of the
Korean War.
The stories
recounted in this extraordinary book, highlighted by more than sixty
photographs, are a valuable commentary on Korea’s early modernization and the
consequences of the Korean War as it set the stage for Korea’s relations with
the world in the late twentieth–early twenty-first centuries.
CONTENTS
In Japanese Occupied Korea:
Half a World Away;
Vigil for a Dying Kingdom;
The Great
Independence Uprising;
Living in Admiral Saito’s Korea;
The Jerusalem of the
East;
The White Russians of Korea;
Life and Death on the Manchurian Frontier;
Western Women in the Land of the Morning Calm;
General Minami and the Iron
Fist;
Render Unto Caesar the Things That Are Caesar’s;
The Rise and Fall of the
Oriental Consolidated Mining Company;
The Winds of War;
Living Dangerously in Chosen
In
Post-Colonial Korea, 1945-1950:
Liberation and
Re-occupation;
Making Korea Safe for Democracy;
Soldiers of Freedom;
Living in
the R.O.K.;
A Country Ripped by War
Epilogue
Donald N.
Clark is
Professor of History at Trinity University in Texas. He grew up in Seoul,
earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University, and has often returned to Korea. His
publications include Christianity in
Modern Korea, Culture and Customs in
Korea, and a section in the Cambridge
History of China.
EastBridge The
Missionary Enterprise in Asia 2003
452 pages photographs, maps, bibliography, index
ISBN 1-891936-11-5 (pb) $29.95